Culture » March 6, 2014

The Perils of Reading While Female

Dayna Tortorici says that she consciously read the 'boy canon' as a teenager in order to overcome her twin afflictions of being from Los Angeles and being a woman, and will 'never forget reading Bukowski’s Post Office and feeling so horrible, the way that the narrator describes the thickness of ugly women’s legs.'

When I was in my early twenties, and not any kind of writer, I was trying to impress a guy who loved Saul Bellow’s novel Herzog. He loved the eponymous protagonist’s voice, his enraged missives to the culture, the way the book was “all about discourse.” Well: I went out, and I bought Herzog. And somewhere in the middle of Herzog, I realized that it was not just “all about discourse.” It was also “all about hating women.” The ex-wife was vicious and castrating, the girlfriend was sexually available yet pathetic, even random women on the street had “bitch eyes.” It was around the point in the book when Herzog reflects, “Will never understand what women want. What do they want? They eat green salad and drink human blood,” that I realized that I didn’t want to finish it.

Which put me in a tight spot. If the man I was interested in asked me about the book, I would have to say that I quit reading it; if he asked me why I quit, I would have to give him a reason. So, the next time it rained, I opened a window and put Herzog out on my windowsill, and I left it there until it was ruined, so that I would have an excuse. I believed it was smarter and more appropriate to destroy a book and lie about it than to admit that the book’s sexism had turned me off.

There are a lot of Herzog moments in No Regrets: Three Discussions, the new “small book” published by the magazine n+1. The book is built around three conversations among three different groups of female writers about reading: what they read when they were younger, what they didn’t read, why it mattered or didn’t. Stories about reading supposedly “great” dudelit only to feel hurt or repulsed come up repeatedly: No Regrets editor Dayna Tortorici says that she consciously read the “boy canon” as a teenager in order to overcome her twin afflictions of being from Los Angeles and being a woman, and will “never forget reading Bukowski’s Post Office and feeling so horrible, the way that the narrator describes the thickness of ugly women’s legs.” Elsewhere, the conversation turns to Henry Miller (Elif Batuman: “he compared women to soup” ), Portnoy’s Complaint (Emily Witt: “I cannot read another passage about masturbation. I can’t.”) and On the Road (Sara Marcus: “I remember putting [it] down the first time a woman was mentioned”).

It’s intensely validating to get outside confirmation that seeming “intellectual” and demonstrating basic self-respect can come into direct conflict for female readers: If you admit to disliking a “great” book simply because it seems to actively hate your entire gender, you’re perceived as petty, “personal,” an identity-politics philistine who values gender-based axe-grinding above aesthetic or intellectual concerns. If No Regrets makes it all right for even one young woman to admit that Kerouac gives her a headache, it’s doing the Lord’s work.

But what struck me most about No Regrets was the sense of each woman having created her own alternative framework, her own way of reading. Alongside the complaints about the boy canon, there are potential subversive readings of its writers: practical lessons that can be drawn from their work without requiring uncritical worship. For example, Emily Gould is able to appropriate some of the swagger of the “midcentury misogynists” (Roth etal.)—the sense that she, too, might be able to write “a novel that says … ‘This is what a novel is, and you can like it or you can get off the bus.’ ” Witt is able to use the boy canon to pinpoint the narratives the men in her life are emulating and her own place as a woman within those stories. My favorite idea in No Regrets is Carla Blumenkranz’ concept of the “secret canon,” the unspoken agreement to valorize a particular set of books and authors in order to belong in a given social group. Blumenkranz sees the “secret canon” as exclusionary, and for the most part, I agree—woe betide you if you tell a certain variety of pseudointellectual man-hippie that you didn’t like On the Road—but No Regrets also invites a more liberating possibility: Maybe every woman writer has to create her own “secret canon,” her own list of essential books, in order to survive the male-dominated cultural definition of “great literature.”

Elsewhere in the book, the participants share their own reading lists: books by women that helped them to orient themselves within the maledominated canon or to form their own ideas of what “good writing” looks like. Judith Butler comes up in more than one conversation, as does Chris Kraus’ I Love Dick—a book about “solving heterosexuality” and the self-enforced oppression therein—and the work of Eileen Myles, of whom Marcus says: “I was diligently trying to find some brilliantly written prose that didn’t respect boundaries between fiction and nonfiction and that dealt with young queer women hanging around in cities and fucking up.” It’s a very specific requirement, but might I also suggest some Michelle Tea?

Once one’s own canon is formed, it no longer needs to be a secret: I got No Regrets from Emily Books, an ebook subscription service run by Ruth Curry and Emily Gould (for which, full disclosure, I’ve written reviews). Its appeal is much the same as the reading lists in No Regrets: the sense that every book that comes down the pike is a further elaboration on a very specific, very interesting idea of what good writing looks like.

Which brings me back to the Herzog incident. The power of a personal canon, secret or not, lies in the authority one needs to create it. Women need to trust that they know what’s good, what’s bad, and what serves them intellectually in order to reject or reclaim the books in their lives. This was exactly what I lacked when I destroyed Herzog. I wasn’t stupid, and I wasn’t a bad reader. But decades of socialization had taught me otherwise. There were the disastrous conversations with men about Eminem, the Beats, Judd Apatow; there were the condescending male classmates in college, such as the guy who made a point of sitting behind me and pulling faces whenever I talked because I’d once complained too forcefully about “whiny white guys”; there was the lit professor who made me rewrite a paper three times because it focused too exclusively on sexism and who told me that the purpose of his class was “appreciation” of the assigned readings, not critique. All of this had given me the implicit belief that I was simply not qualified to decide which books were good for me, that I would be seen as anti-intellectual if I decided that a sexist book was not worth my time.

What No Regrets argues for most powerfully is the right of women to reject that line of thinking and to believe that they are qualified to decide what literature should be. It argues for the public claiming of formerly secret canons: the right to create your own vision of what is best in the culture and to have that vision influence what books other people read and value.

Sady Doyle is an In These Times Staff Writer. She also contributes regularly to Rookie Magazine, and was the founder of the blog Tiger Beatdown. She's the winner of the first Women's Media Center Social Media Award. She's interested in women in pop culture, women creating pop culture, reproductive rights, and women's relationship to the Internet and the Left. You can follow her on Twitter at @sadydoyle, or e-mail her at sady inthesetimes.com.

"I opened a window and put Herzog out on my windowsill, and I left it there until it was ruined, so that I would have an excuse. I believed it was smarter and more appropriate to destroy a book and lie about it than to admit that the book’s sexism had turned me off."

Act Two

"Envision a blazing bonfire in a temple, and breathe in its warmth and serenity. Then, imagine me dumping all your comic books and action figures and first-edition hardback Song of Ice and Fire novels INTO the bonfire, and cackling wildly."

Act Three

An article rife with Sturm und Drang in defense of the actions at Kaiser-Franz-Josef-Platz on May 10, 1933.

Dénouement

"L'État, c'est moi"

Posted by Altus Quinque on 2014-03-13 20:33:26

I have to disagree with you on at least 1 point. Books are extremely powerful, and since we access books through reading, books are in turn beautifully dangerous. Take a religious text like the Bible or the Qu'ran. They are just books, but they have the power to determine the behavior of millions of people for better or worse. Millions have died of AIDS because they don't believe that the Bible supports contraception. Women are subject to brutality and oppression on the strength of ancient texts. Those are big examples of course, but there are political manifestos, works of fiction, of science fiction that have shaped our realities and changed the world. It makes me think about the recent changes to the DSM with the 5th edition that came out. Asbergers was reclassified under the broader classification of Autism Spectrum disorders, and it drastically changed the lives of millions of children and adults. What Oscar Wilde wrote in The Picture of Dorian Gray got him sentenced to hard labor for gross indecency. Writing and reading are dangerous and powerful acts that I would classify as far from benign.

Posted by positive_cynic on 2014-03-10 22:40:09

Was "A Canon Without Balls" a runner-up title? I see it found a place in the web link! Nice!

Posted by Samantha on 2014-03-10 11:20:31

I agree with much of what you say, but great writers also need great empathy with their readers. Consider the 1945-1970 years, an unabashedly and unconsciously sexist era, and imagine being a smart 2014 female forced to read book after acclaimed book by heavy-hitting males of that era. That would be a perilous process, especially for a young person. It's not the fact of the sexism/misogynism, but just its sheer quantity that does damage. Maybe a revised canon would be something to consider. Was Herzog _really_ all that great? I remember it very dimly as a load of white boy whining.

Posted by fairleft on 2014-03-09 07:22:38

Complaining too forcefully about “whiny white guys” isn't the worst thing a person can do, and it shouldn't be punished at all, much less in the pathetic manner of your former classmate.

Posted by fairleft on 2014-03-09 07:13:14

Are you stupid?

Posted by For reals on 2014-03-07 14:34:19

Books should never ever be banned, this is the biggest human flaw there is, reactive and restrictive reasoning. And banning things only gives them more appeal, especially for people like me. Many women don't actually like a lot of things but that is also a meaningless argument. If you find yourself beautiful, smart, and valuable, than anyone can say anything at all and it would just be words on a page, not some personal attack or worse, an assumed attack on behalf of all women. Women who are described in fiction as fat, ugly, stupid, or untrustworthy are not being de-humanized, they are being described. You can not claim that ugliness does not and should not exist or should be ignored. Every man and woman has the right to express themselves, their personal tastes. We can be as rude as we want to be. It's called freedom of speech and the right to use filthy vocabulary to express our inner state. We are not children or fragile objects. We can take a few words in the eye and survive to tell about it.

Posted by Jordan Sorros on 2014-03-07 12:34:51

Moses Herzog isn't meant to be a likeable character in the first place, but a scared, pathetic, deeply flawed failure. He's not a hero. One tends to think he deserved to be cuckolded, in fact, because he's a dick. His anger at his ex-wives is really anger at himself for his own failures. At least that's how I read it. You can't read a character's thoughts as the author's opinions.

Posted by Brie on 2014-03-07 10:54:23

If reading is the most benign activity there is, why do some books get banned? While you might be one woman who doesn't get offended by a book that portrays women as slightly less than human, many women don't actually like that--and the book she's referencing, "No Regrets" is written by women with that standpoint. I also find it strange that you assume a book that doesn't dehumanize women must be "feel good drivel."

Posted by Julia M. on 2014-03-07 08:35:44

First of all, I am a woman, and by using the full blinders of your suppositions, you have neglected to stay focused on the content of what I am saying. There is no collective 'women'. We are all individuals and we can only speak for ourselves. This collective delusion is not getting anyone anywhere. The title of this article begins 'The perils of reading..." If a woman keeps talking about the perils of something as simple as reading a book, then it makes it sound like reading is somehow akin to walking a tightrope over a pool of sharks or hiding in a trench somewhere while bombs fly overhead. There are no perils of reading. Reading is the most benign activity there is. The books we read had the traction to make it to print. So each of us has to write something that equally captures the real cruelty of life, rather than filling our bookshelves with feel good drivel. I frankly enjoy a devastating blow to my literary sensibility regardless of who the author is and I wish more women would do the same.

Posted by Jordan Sorros on 2014-03-07 00:10:45

Thank you.

Posted by Joseph Parrie on 2014-03-06 23:52:56

Since this issue is about women finding more power in our culture, why not let women, collectively, sort out what "the answer is," rather than thinking you can tell them what their answer is(n't) in the comments section of the internet. You could try that.

Posted by CapsPsycho on 2014-03-06 17:22:47

Yes it is true that men say horrible things about women and sometimes very well spoken men say horrible things about women in highly acclaimed works of literature. But the answer is not to burn or soak the books or to complain that men are too enthusiastic about what other men say and write. The fact is that there are a lot of horrible women out there and many of these men are telling the truth, that is why their work is so successful and everlasting. The key is for women to be honest and cut-throat. There are an equal number of horrible men out there and it's someone's job to illuminate them. Sexism is not about always saying positive and glowing things about every single person and the whole group or the whole sex in general, it's about the failure of one group or one sex in being brutally honest in regards to the other. It's time for women to stop pointing out every single incidence of cruelty and create some of their own. Literature, as our personal opinions, are not travel brochures about the wonderful paradise that is earth and all of human relations. Literature is also the successful and eloquent communication of how much we hate and despise each other, and that is ok, that is a perfectly normal human emotion. Writing is not the practice of making everyone feel loved, that is a parent's job. Writing is about the truth. The truth is sexist. It will always be sexist. Look at yourself in the mirror and ask yourself, wouldn't you trade places with the person in power, with the person who creates powerful words and is so free and uninhibited to write and say whatever they wish and have millions of people agree or enjoy or find some truth in what you are saying, to unburden yourself with all of your emotions, negative and positive and neutral all the same? If it were easy, you would do it. But it is emotionally difficult to be honest and to be so dark. If you want success, you have to suffer for it. You can't just be polite and politically correct all the time and focus only on what people shouldn't be saying. Censorship and staying quiet are the easy way out of being a successful writer. It doesn't matter who you are or what you look like. Avoidance is not going to gain you any ground.